Why Hope Powell should be managing the MENS' Olympics football team as well as the women's

By Ian Winwood

Published 11:57 21/10/11

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This morning, while laying somewhere between consciousness and its opposite, I thought for a moment that I’d entered a Utopian Wonderland where all things were equal and where everything was fair.

With the radio turned down low, I believed that I’d heard the news report state that Stuart Pearce and Hope Powell were to be the managers of the Great Britain Olympic football team.

‘How brilliant is that?’ I thought, blinking into the light. ‘Someone who sits down to pee co-managing the England plus Gareth Bale… er, the British team? How fantastic!”

The kettle was boiled by the time I realised that when it comes to the Olympics there are two separate GB teams. There is one who wear sports bras, and one – Wayne Rooney aside – who do not.

Stuart Pearce is managing the geezers; Hope Powell is managing the gals.

How foolish of me to think otherwise.

The Olympics, though, should we forget, can be an occasion for radicalism. In 1936 Jesse Owens outraged Hitler at the Berlin games by turning the notion of the master race on its arse by claiming the gold medal for the 100 metres.

Then, in Mexico City in 1968 US African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised the ‘Black Power’ salute on the podium as they received their medals for the 200 metres.

So in this tradition of political stridency, imagine the great leap forward the appointment of Hope Powell to the management bench of Team GB would represent. It would break a glass ceiling with a screaming volley of progressive thinking.

And, really, what would be the harm?

Hope Powell’s name has already been mentioned in connection with a vacancy at then League 2 side Grimsby Town – and had the Mariners given her the job then maybe they’d still be in League 2.

But even those who believe that ‘women have no place in football’ would surely concede that the Olympics is a free-pass tournament, a busman’s holiday.

If the Mens’ Team GB do well, all well and good; if they suck, then not only no one mind, no one will really notice. In terms of an event, this is the Community Shield of international competition.

So give the woman a go: if top managers don’t have to be top players, then why do they even have to be men?

It may seem startling to say this, but it possible that in years to come women will manage mens’ football teams. And when they do, wouldn’t it be something to say that it was the British that first pioneered the idea?

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